When I'm singing, it's a mixture of my innocence in the projects, my mom and dad. It's all the good and the bad, the laughs and the frowns that I went through and seen other people go through. Then you be trying to write it. Whatever's coming out, you try and make it all cool.

Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.

You never know how much time you got.

Age and numbers are a concept made up by man.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

I believe that any type of education can be great, but an education about ourselves can create something wonderful. I am a comedian, but people have called me a motivational speaker. I don't really consider myself that at all.

There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music - and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I've had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.